Charge Off Credit Union Loan

Can a credit union charge-off a loan if I am less than 90 days late in my payments?

What do you do if a credit union that I used to work for charged off a loan that I was less than 90 days late but yet I was still paying on it? I was trying to get the loan caught up and in February of 2008 I made two payments and went back the next month to find out that the loan was charged off the end of February of 2008? Can they do this if I am still showing an effort to pay?

Published: Aug 2, 2010

Charge-off usually occurs between 180 and 240 days from the date of last payment.

Creditors may have shorter times to write-off than accounting guidelines recommend.

Negotiate with your creditor to repay the loan with terms you can afford.

The creditor can charge off a delinquent loan, regardless of what may be surmised from the debtor's intent. Allow me to define several terms before I answer your question further.

Charge-off (sometimes called "write-off") is an accounting term used by creditors when they move a delinquent account from its accounts receivable books to its bad debt ledger. This usually occurs between 180 and 240 days from the date of the last payment. The fact that an account is charged-off does not mean the debt may not be collected later. The charge-off date also does not correspond to the statute of limitations on collecting a debt, or the date that an entry on a credit record must be removed. All three dates or deadlines are independent of each other and have different meanings.

Because an account is charged off does not mean the creditor lacks a legal right to collect the debt. To the contrary, the creditor may move the account to its own internal collections department, or sell the debt to a third-party collection agency.

A loan is a contract between the creditor and debtor. Under most loan contracts I have read, a delinquency is a delinquency, and there is no requirement that a creditor give a debtor a grace period before considering a debt delinquent. The charge-off discussion above concerns guidelines, for the most part, that banks are creditors follow. A creditor may have a shorter time to write-off than accounting guidelines recommend.

Recommendation

I do not see any violations of law reported in your message. (Readers with more experience in accounting or securities law are welcomed to comment below.) If the creditor sold your collection account, negotiate with it to repay the loan with terms you can afford. Alternatively, go to the Bills.com debt relief savings center to get a no-cost, no-obligation quote from a pre-screened debt resolution service provider.